The biggest problem IMO is the loooooooong animation delay built into every UI interaction. It's so hard to get into a flow state or even maintain a train of thought when you have to wait for everything on the screen to stop sliding, wiggling, wobbling, jiggling, refracting, distorting, and flashing.
I’m guessing you might know already, but just in case you don’t, “reduce motion” in the accessibility settings menu is essential to productivity and sanity.
There needs to be a happy medium. I don't like reduce motion because it amputates many of the spatial arrangement metaphors inherent in the iOS UI.
My biggest problem with authoring shortcuts is that the editor goes out of its way to obliterate context while you're working. Full-screen editors to change a setting lay on top everything else you're working on. Placeholders for variables, which themselves have no actual names. It's a mess.
This does nothing to remove the loooooong animations. Much of the interface still jiggles, wobbles, slides, etc. It just replaces a fraction of those with fade animations that are just as long. It's just a high-latency interface all throughout.
It does seem like the logical automation platform to prepare repeatable tasks that the end user might want to do.
The permissions and secure app integration models are all there, and it’s reasonably stable.
It was always puzzling why there was never an exportable scripting language, just shareable links. I think I ended up sharing screen shots with Claude last time I wanted to troubleshoot something.